The White House unveiled its national Artificial Intelligence action plan on Wednesday, with a primary mission to create an environment within the U.S. for AI technologies to “succeed and thrive.”
The document, Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan, focuses on maintaining the nation’s competitive edge in AI technology development and deployment, mainly through the removal of regulatory and bureaucratic barriers.
Structured in three pillars — accelerating innovation, building infrastructure and leading in diplomacy — the plan prioritizes U.S. leadership in AI at the scientific, infrastructure and policy levels.
“AI is a technology that has an ecosystem, and in order to win the race, you need to have the biggest ecosystem,” White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks said during a Wednesday morning call with reporters.
Some of the recommended action items outlined in the plan include asking select federal agencies and offices to help identify and remove potentially burdensome barriers. Per one request, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is tasked with launching a request for information to survey businesses about federal regulations that may be overly oppressive to private sector growth.
States will be under more scrutiny as well. One recommended action item asks the Office of Management and Budget to evaluate individual states’ regulatory regimes and determine whether or not those states should qualify for federal grants based on how hospitable their legal climates are for private sector companies.
The action plan also identifies open-source and open-weight AI systems as key contributors to a robust AI ecosystem. The document states that ensuring the specific model details are available to the developer community to build upon will benefit commercial growth and government adoption of AI.
“We need to ensure America has leading open models founded on American values,” the plan reads. “Open-source and open-weight models could become global standards in some areas of business and in academic research worldwide. For that reason, they also have geostrategic value. While the decision of whether and how to release an open or closed model is fundamentally up to the developer, the Federal government should create a supportive environment for open models.”
To support this, the plan taps the National Science Foundation’s National AI Research Resource pilot to partner with leading tech companies to boost access to these models and their data.
The new White House plan also aims to ensure these models are free from any ideological biases. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios said on the Wednesday call that the federal procurement guidelines will be updated to only permit contracting with vendors whose models produce unbiased content.
“In order for all Americans to adopt and realize the benefits of AI, these systems must be built to reflect truth and objectivity, not top down ideological bias,” Kratsios said.
To help cement this policy, the plan recommends revising the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s AI Risk Management Framework to remove all references to diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as misinformation.
Some of the AI Action Plan’s tenets have garnered pushback from advocacy groups.
“The plan seeks to require that ‘the government only contracts with’ developers who meet the administration’s ideological criteria,” Kit Walsh, the director of AI and Access-to-Knowledge Legal Projects at the Electronic Frontiers Foundation said in a statement. “While the government can choose to purchase only services that meet such criteria, it cannot require that developers refrain from also providing non-government users other services conveying other ideas.”
Still, Walsh identified the development of open models as a positive step towards democratizing leading AI software products.
“One positive proposal we’ve spotted is promoting the development of open models and making it possible for a wider range of people to participate in shaping AI research and development,” he said. “If implemented well, this could lead to a greater diversity of viewpoints and values reflected in AI technologies, compared to a world where only the largest companies and agencies are able to develop AI.”
The non-profit Public Citizen also raised further concerns on Tuesday about the administration’s approach to AI supremacy, underscoring worries about a forthcoming AI executive order and the Trump administration’s broader AI policy.
“We are deeply concerned about the plan,” said Lisa Gilbert, Public Citizen’s co-president. “From what’s been reported, we believe that Trump’s AI Executive Order will take aim at state AI regulation, unleash land and energy for data centers, and also target what it calls ‘woke AI’, an ill-advised continuation of their harmful anti-diversity agenda, among other things.”
